Amelia works at the intersection of design, user experience, and data visualization. She’s the Executive Director and co-founder of Double Union, a non-profit feminist community workshop, and co-founded the publication Model View Culture. She spends her time reading, writing, biking, climbing, and working on interesting things. We asked Amelia to tell us more about her amazing sticker design.

How did you come up with the idea for the sticker?

Feminism as a “dirty word” is a concept that’s funny because it strikes at the truth of the matter: a lot of people and organizations ARE afraid to say it. The Ada Initiative was one of the first woman-focused tech organizations to actually say the word “feminism.” Their work has profoundly changed tech culture, and part of it comes from opening up the ability to identify publicly as a feminist in tech. They’ve brought many of us who aren’t afraid to say “the F-word” together – and given us a way to do something about the problem, by funding the Ada Initiative’s work.

The sticker sure is eye-catching! It feels like it has many levels to it, despite being all black and white. How did you achieve that?

From the beginning, I knew I would work with hand lettering for this design because I wanted to create an organic form that stands out against the mass of vectorized, illustrator’d shapes on a laptop. I wanted the fundraiser sticker to be a refreshing visual break from tech culture’s dominant (current) forms, to echo how TAI represents changing tech culture to me.

Amelia’s workspace, with ink and brush

I started by drawing potential layouts in my sketchbook until I found a rough shape that took advantage of the die cut. Then I used brushes and india ink to letter the phrases “Not afraid to” “F-word” in many different ways, and scanned those in at a super high DPI to capture all the little details in the brushstrokes.

Intermediate sketches of the f-word sticker design

Using Photoshop and my Wacom tablet, I moved parts of the scans around until I found a combination of lettering that was playful and eye catching, and easy to read at the size I wanted to print the sticker.

The sticker does have many levels! Working from scans of hand lettering let me use Photoshop tools like “Invert” and “Levels” to bring out the natural variations in the ink painted on paper. I wanted to hit a charcoal tint in the background and bring out the rich variations of ink in the letters.

How important are design and memorable images to feminist activism?

So incredibly crucial! One of the things we’re doing with our feminist activism is building our own community and design and memorable images are a huge part in building a movement. We need a visual language to talk about it with, to identify with and gather round. Imagery of high heels and business suits alone won’t cut it. To represent all of us working to improve tech culture – we need things that speak our own language, have tech snark, incorporate our memes. We need propaganda! Especially physical objects like stickers, buttons, totes, and posters – to act as signposts. Things that say “this is us, this is what we stand for!”

Will you be putting this sticker on something you own?

Yes! I’m primarily a printmaker, which means I design so many things that get printed in multiples that I couldn’t possibly keep everything around or my apartment would fill up! But this is a sticker that easily makes the cut.

Here’s how it looks on my laptop!

What I appreciate about stickers like this one is that they’re so great for signaling affinity. I know that if I see another “F-word” sticker across the room at a coffeeshop or conference, that person is someone who’s also trying to make tech better – someone I may want to go talk to! I also like that this sticker starts conversations – it’s definitely something that catches the eye.

I am a huge fan of the Ada Initiative’s work changing tech culture, so I love when people ask about the sticker – I get a chance to introduce someone to conference anti-harassment policies or ally skills workshops!

Do you say the f-word? F-F-FEMINISM! Donate $128 or more (or $10 a month) to the Ada Initiative before October 8 and receive the F-word sticker as a thank you gift for supporting our work for women in open technology and culture!

When Jim C Hines read the Code of Conduct during the opening ceremonies of this year’s North American Science Fiction Convention, I nearly stood up and cheered. I was so, so grateful to Con Chair Tammy Coxen and safety officer Jesi Pershing–and to Tom Smith and Jim, the Masters of Ceremony–for working to make DetConOne a safe and welcoming environment.

Mary Gardiner and Val Aurora of the Ada Initiative

I was also grateful to the Ada Initiative, who wrote the template anti-harassment policy in effect at the conference. The Ada Initiative is dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture–including fan culture. One of their biggest victories has been drastically increasing the adoption of strong, clear, specific anti-harassment policies at conventions. I’m a proud supporter of the Ada Initiative and a member of their Advisory Board. Will you join me in supporting their vital work?

The first time I saw Mary Robinette Kowal fight harassment was at a science fiction convention where a guy had just made a gross comment about a cosplayer in front of a packed room. While I was still trying to process what the guy had said, Mary fixed him with the most withering “what on earth just came out of your mouth” stare I have ever seen. The guy literally winced. Then he apologized–and for the rest of the night, he watched his mouth.

I remember thinking that I wished she’d been around when I was a thirteen-year-old cosplayer, getting propositioned for sex in the middle of the dealers’ room. Back then, harassment was so endemic to the Science Fiction community that I thought it was just the price of admission. No one else seemed to mind grown men following me around making gross comments, photographing me without permission, or inviting me to ‘private’ room parties, so I assumed it was a norm I had to adjust to.

I’m grateful for the progress the science fiction community has made since then. If science fiction fandom still looked–and acted–like it did back when I was that awkward thirteen-year-old girl, I’m pretty sure my aspirations of becoming a science fiction writer would be gathering dust on a shelf next to my old convention programs. Now a young professional breaking into the industry, I benefit enormously from the work the Ada Initiative, Mary Robinette, N.K. Jemisin, and others have put into making fandom a safer and more welcoming place.

I strongly recommend the Ada Initiative’s detailed timeline of the anti-harassment movement in science fiction. Part of feminist advocacy is giving credit where it is due, and the Ada Initiative’s timeline documents much of the hard work–and hard workers–behind making fandom a safer and more welcoming space.

NK Jemisin

I’m especially grateful to the writers and fans of color, including NK Jemisin (who’s fantastic Guest of Honor speech from this year’s Wiscon should pretty much be required reading), whose hard work and perseverance in the face of cluelessness, blatant racism, and ongoing threats and harassment has finally begun to change the discourse around race in fandom.

We still have a long way to go before organized fandom truly reflects the vibrance and diversity of the fan community. While this work will never get done without hundreds of volunteers carrying the banner, leaving the fight for diversity exclusively to volunteers is an unfair burden–a ‘second shift’ that falls disproportionately on women and marginalized fans. That’s why I’m proud to support the Ada Initiative, which pays advocates a fair wage to do this vitally important work.

the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”

Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

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The dynamic the kids have when putting all things aside and just being creative is completely different than the Punch Buggy game. In theory, they could argue that the car isn’t really a car, because it doesn’t really look like a car, and the door isn’t a door at all, and that it really should be used for a window. But they don’t. They just create. They don’t criticize. They don’t try and convince each other that the other person is wrong. They don’t make assumptions about what the other person’s intentions were, or how they are feeling. They just create. They encourage, they discuss, and they create.

Disappointing a few customers who like a pun is not the same as being respectful of your customer base at large and the issues that face women everywhere….The context doesn’t obscure or render it neutral and harmless.

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A year ago, a friend of mine was groped at an open source conference. Again. I’ve personally been groped twice at conferences myself.

But what shocked me most was the reaction to her blog post about it. Hundreds of people made comments like, “Women should expect to get groped at conferences,” and “It was her fault.” Many of these people were members of the open source community. Some were even prominent leaders – that I was forced to work with directly in my job as a Linux kernel developer! I realized I’d felt alienated, unwelcome, and unsafe as a woman in open source for many years. I was furious and determined to make a difference.

So I quit my job and co-founded the Ada Initiative with Mary Gardiner. We are the only non-profit dedicated solely to increasing the participation of women in open source, Wikipedia, fan culture, and other areas of open technology and culture. Currently, women make up only 2% of the open source community, and 9% of Wikipedia editors, down from 13% a year ago. We want to change these trends.

You can help by donating or by spreading the word about our donation drive now:

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished already. Since our founding in early 2011, we helped over 30 conferences and organizations adopt an anti-harassment policy, organized the first AdaCamp unconference, provided free consulting on high-profile sexist incidents, wrote and taught two workshops on supporting women in open tech/culture, and ran two surveys, among other things.

Your donations will fund upcoming projects like: Ada’s Advice, a comprehensive guide to resources for helping women in open tech/culture, Ada’s Careers, a career development community, and First Patch Week, where we help women create and submit their first open source patch. You can learn more about how the Ada Initiative is organized and operated on our web site and blog.

Whether or not you can donate yourself, you can help us by spreading the word about our fundraising drive. Please tell your friends about our important work. Email, blog, add our donation button to your web site, and tweet. You don’t have to stand on the sidelines any longer. You can help women in open technology and culture, starting today.

The Ada Initiative is holding an AdaCamp in Melbourne, Australia on January 14 for everyone interested in supporting women in open tech and culture, from wikis to open government to digital liberties to open source. Applications to attend close December 14.

How not to market science to girls: This is an apparently successful Australian company that sells science kits for kids. That’s great, and some of the kits look pretty good. The problem is, they split some of the kits into ones for boys, and ones for girls. And that split is exactly what you think.

It’s 1980 and women’s writing is being dismissed: Quote from Ben Bova: Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.

Repost: What I Thought About Twilight: And the verdict is… surprisingly not terrible… My conclusion is that one of the things that I think makes it popular with teenagers also negates some of the moral panic argument: Bella’s agency.

Women in Open Source Survey: We all know about the challenges that open source software faces when it comes to women, and the number of women in the open source world actually has been a frequent argument of discussion and research… [Sourceforge] just launched a survey based on the original FLOSSPOLS 10 questions.

Scientific American Defends Marie Curie—and Women Scientists—in 1911: As the first woman editor in chief of Scientific American, I’m keenly aware of the sense of standing on the shoulders of giants—some of them clearly frequented our editorial offices in 1911. I thought you’d enjoy in its entirety an editorial that ran in the January 21, 1911 issue.

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This is a cross-post from the Ada Initiative’s blog. The Ada Initiative has put a lot of effort into helping conferences understand and adopt some form of anti-harassment policy. Your donations will help us continue to promote the policy and do similar work. Thanks!

Tim O’Reilly: “[…] It’s become clear that this is a real, long-standing issue in the technical community. And we do know this: we don’t condone harassment or offensive behavior, at our conferences or anywhere. It’s counter to our company values. More importantly, it’s counter to our values as human beings.”

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-organizer of PyCon US, speaking for himself in this post: “A published code of conduct tells me that the conference staff cares about these issues, takes them seriously, and is waiting and willing to listen if an incident happens. It’s by no means a solution to the depressing homogeneity of technical communities, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

ACM SIGPLAN: “This policy has been in the works at the ACM SIGPLAN for several months; SPLASH 2011 is proud to be both the driver for that effort and the first ACM conference with such policy in place. This policy is not a symbolic gesture, delivered to satisfy a perceived need for political correctness, but instead goes to the core of both our personal beliefs and the beliefs of the community as a whole.”

Like any good open source project, the policy has been forked, adapted, and rewritten from scratch several times. Conference organizers looking to adopt a policy now can choose from several different policies. Many policies are linked to from this list of conferences with a policy; if you know a conference that is missing, please add it!

People who saw these incidents didn’t know how to respond to these incidents or weren’t sure who to report them to.

Conference organizers sometimes didn’t learn about an incident until long after it happened. When they did find out in time to take action, they often didn’t know how to respond to the incident.

We looked at these facts and figured it might help if conference organizers had an easy way to:

Educate attendees in advance that specific behaviors commonly believed to be okay (like groping, pornography in slides, etc.) are not acceptable at this conference.

Tell attendees how to report these behaviors if they see them, and assure them they will be treated respectfully if they do so.

Have established, documented procedures for how the conference staff will respond to these reports.

But we knew that conference organizers are very busy people, and very few of them had the time to write something like this. We figured that if we wrote an example policy that could be easily adapted to their needs, we could save them a lot of time and energy, and reduce harassment at conferences at the same time.

One year later, it looks like we had the right idea! Now it’s almost easier to attend a open tech/culture conference with a policy than one without. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, from attendees of all genders to speakers to organizers, and especially conference sponsors. Sponsors like any way to reduce the chance that their name will be associated with bad press.

You can help encourage adoption

Our goal is to make policies like this obsolete because everyone knows how to go to a conference without ruining it for the people around them. But we’re clearly not there yet, as this incident from October 2011 shows. One way you can help change the culture of open technology and culture is by encouraging the adoption of a similar policy by the conferences you attend.

Here are some of the common arguments against adopting a policy that addresses the three points we describe above.

This has/will never happen at my conference!

Congratulations! Some conferences are small enough or exclusive enough that it’s easy to end up with a group of people who all agree about appropriate conference behavior. Generally speaking though, as a conference gets larger or easier to attend, the mathematical probability of someone with significantly different ideas attending the conference increases until it is a near-certainty.

Next, if you believe there’s never been harassment at your conference, you might want to do a little asking around. If you don’t have a well-publicized method to contact the organizers about harassment at the conference, you’re unlikely to hear about it. When this policy was first posted, many organizers went back and asked attendees if they’d ever heard of harassment at previous conferences they had run and found the answer to be yes surprisingly often.

Finally, a great way to keep up a perfect record of no harassment is to adopt a policy that tells attendees you expect them not to harass each other.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming evidence from previous incidents shows that many of the people involved had absolutely no idea that what they were doing was unacceptable – and in fact were quite angry to discover that there were some unspoken rules that no one told them about. You may not enjoy telling people the rules specifically, but people hate breaking rules unknowingly even more.

To be blunt, a non-trivial percentage of speakers at open tech/culture conferences view pornography in their slides as simply good speaking technique. Telling them, e.g., to only include material suitable for a diverse audience won’t change their behavior because they believe everyone enjoys a little pornography in their technical talk. The only way they are going to stop including pornography in their slides is if you tell them not to, in so many words. Another non-trivial percentage believe it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to touch a woman on any part of her body without her consent if either the man or the woman is drinking alcohol. They believe this is appropriate behavior, so asking them to, e.g., “Be respectful of other people” is not specific enough to change their behavior.

This policy will hamper free speech and ruin my talk!

Conferences and their topics vary, but we have yet to attend a conference in open technology and culture in which a talk required the harassment of attendees in order to get information across. We’re not sure, but we suspect you can, e.g., teach people about file system semantics and keep the audience’s attention without employing sexist jokes. (I’ve done it more than once!)

Conferences in which talks about sexuality, racism, etc. are on-topic are encouraged to add exceptions for these talks and give guidelines on talking about the subject while respecting the attendees. We encourage them to send us their modifications so we can add them to the options in the example policy. Here is one example of the policy as applied to a talk about sexuality by Cindy Gallop at the Open Video Conference 2011.

In the end, you can always vote with your feet – you can preferentially attend, speak at, and help organize conferences with policies against harassment.

A note: We want to explicitly acknowledge the fact that harassment at conferences is not just a problem for women; in fact, we’ve heard many reports of men being the target of harassment, or being disgusted or creeped out by other attendees’ behavior. In this as in many cases, the changes that make open technology and culture more welcoming (and safer) for women are the same ones that make it more welcoming for everyone.

Another old project moved (copied) to the GF wiki: Mary imported the Women in FLOSS bibliography she originally wrote for LinuxChix and added some new material. Add all material you know of related to women in free/open source software: both reports and talks.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Trigger warningAssange’s Account Looks Like Accusers’ Account: Assange’s own attorney now effectively concedes that was, at best, what happened here: His victims gave subsequent consent to sexual activity for which explicit consent was neither sought nor given

Why We Can’t Let Design Become a Boys’ Club: This is all such a bummer! We haven’t vaulted ourselves very far above the 1960s stereotypes presented on Mad Men. But it’s not as if women designers and illustrators aren’t out there.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

The Ada Initiative, the non-profit Valerie Aurora and I have founded to increase women’s participation in open technology and culture, is fundraising right now with our Seed 100 campaign. The aim of the campaign is twofold: to raise money for our startup phase including program development, and to demonstrate to larger sponsors the community interest. We’re in our last week and our big push to reach 100 now.

We’ve resisted posting about Seed 100 here to date, since we want GF and the Ada Initiative to stand apart, but we enjoyed this story a lot, so we’re cross-posted it as a Wednesday Geek Woman special edition, honouring both the Sydney Google Women Engineers Group themselves, and the women they’ve named their meeting rooms for!

One of our donors at the Analytical Engineer level is a consortium, the Sydney Google Women Engineers Group. We asked the members of this group to answer some interview questions and tell us a little more about themselves, the Sydney Google office, and why they donated.

Tell us more about the Google Sydney Women Engineers Group.

The Sydney Google Women Engineers group is an official network, and all of the women engineers are included. We have lunch together once a month and we have an ongoing budget for events that promote and encourage women in computing, group activities and off-sites. For example, recently we took an acrylic painting class together; for a bunch of engineering types, the opportunity to splash paint onto canvas was certainly novel!

The Google Sydney office has meeting rooms named after historical women in computing. Which women and why?

The names of the meetings rooms are: Antonelli, Lovelace, Hopper, SpÃ¤rck Jones, Liskov and Perlman. The names were chosen by the women engineers’ group by consensus, after much discussion.

Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were obvious choices as some of the most well known (and hugely influential) women in the history of computing.

Karen SpÃ¤rck Jones‘ work on information retrieval, and her invention of the Inverse Document Frequency measure in particular, is especially relevant to Google as a search company.

Barbara Liskov‘s well-known work in object oriented programming language theory earned her a Turing Award, John von Neumann medal and numerous other honours.

Finally, Radia Perlman‘s work on network design, in particular her Spanning Tree Protocol is also fundamental to our daily work.

The room names were voted on by the entire office, so we needed to promote our idea to everyone. It took the support of the whole office, men and women, for the idea to be put into place, and we’re really proud of seeing the names there today. Here is what we wrote to promote the idea:

The women in computer science’s history are too seldom celebrated, despite the fact that they have been an active part of the field since its very inception […]. By naming our meeting rooms after the women who have helped make our field what it is today, we can make a positive statement about Google’s commitment to promoting gender equality in computer science, while paying tribute to these pioneers and reflecting the Sydney office’s openness to diversity.

In addition to being named after women in computing, each room has a picture and biography of the woman it’s named after.

Is the Ada Lovelace meeting room where your [Seed 100 donor reward] print from the Lovelace and Babbage comic will end up or do you have other plans for it?

Yes, the Lovelace and Babbage poster will take pride of place in the Ada Lovelace meeting room once it arrives, along with the photo and bio of Ada Lovelace that is already there.

Does anyone else honour famous women geeks in this manner? Do you have meeting rooms, computers or anything else named in their honour? If you were naming your meeting rooms, which names would you use?